Gods of Earth (37 page)

Hexus wandered down the mountain, stumbling, a mystified and mixed being. For six days he wandered, chewing roots and drinking water from puddles, as the Stalker knew how to do. He descended from the dry highlands down into a warm, thick forest, dense with trees. All the while, his dismay grew. Where were the great ships that darkened the stars? Where the flying trains? Where the lights of the vast cities? Where the many, many human beings? He could not conceive how humanity had fallen from the glory of the Penultimate Age to this bleak emptiness. Had he been pulled somehow into a parallel world, some infernal other dimension?

On the seventh day of wandering, he trudged into a human village, set between the forest and the start of a broad grassland. It was the first sign of human dwelling that he had yet seen. A few dozen dirty and leaning huts of graying wood, with thatched roofs turning black with rot, crowded around a street of knee-deep black mud. It stank of feces and rotting potatoes. Rain pissed down on everything. A few scraps of smoke tried to climb from crumbling chimneys and were beaten down by the cold shower.

He plodded slowly through the mud, falling twice and landing on his face in the filth, unwilling to stop his fall with his right hand. Some miserable women peered at him from under the leaking lees of their tottering homes, their gray faces pocked with disease, limp hair hanging over their rheumy and colorless eyes.

In the center of the village he stopped in horror. Before him, thrust into the mud, two thick beams roped together at their crossing formed an X. A huge gorilla, a female, with an oversized head, was spread out on it. Rusting stakes had been hammered through her wrists and ankles. As Hexus stared, confounded, she lifted her head and looked at him. He shrank back. He had
assumed the gorilla was dead, but no, they had crucified a living, soulburdened being.

Warily, a pack of men approached him, seeming to condense out of the mud and filth, gaining courage as they saw him stand in perplexity before the ape. Their long stringy hair and beards streamed with rain. They held clubs and knives and stones.

“Why have you done this?” Hexus called to them. “Why do you torture this being with this horrid, slow death?”

“Ya’oughten get gu’n!” one shouted. His open mouth held a few black, rotting teeth. The tongue was gray with disease, the red eyes two finger widths apart. Hexus the Stalker looked at him, both not recognizing and recognizing this degenerate form of human being.

Then Hexus held up the Stalker’s hand and the eye of the god looked upon them.

The men gasped and shrank back.

“Sa monst’!” another man barked in their guttural demotic speech, terrified and also enraged by the eye. Hexus had not expected this. In the Penultimate Age, satyrs with tall, twisted horns walked the streets; Makine dragons perched on buildings or clung below bridges; soulburdened bonobos in silk suits sipped tea in cafes and made jovial, lewd offers—many of which were accepted—to the humans who passed. It was the right of any sentient being to remake herself as she saw fit. In that time, the world accepted the flourishing of dreams.

“Hear me!” Hexus called. But one of the men—a boy, really—threw a club spiked with angry shards of corroded metal. It hit the Stalker in the shoulder and cut deeply into him.

“Enough!” Hexus howled. That was the first time he reached out with his nascent powers and bent space. He bent it inside and around the pale boy who threw the club. His spine folded over with a loud crack, and then he split in two with a wet tearing sound.

A hail of clubs and knives flew at Hexus. Hexus rounded space so that they passed him without effect. Then he started breaking the
worthless, cruel things, too decayed to deserve the name
human
. He screamed, as he slew them, the questions that had haunted him for days.

“Where are the Fathers and Mothers of the Theogenics Guild?” Seven men fell, their legs twisted off.

“Where are the towers of Theopolis?” A row of houses was crushed flat, grinding down into the foul mud the women and few feeble children hiding within them.

“Where do the Hekademon debate our spirit?” A shrieking man’s head exploded as space expanded within him. As others looked on in terror, their own skulls burst.

“Where are the star-spanning ships? Where the music of ancient living machines?” A fire took to the last hut of the village and spread unnaturally, insanely fast down the row, burning the very air out of the homes as it consumed their rotting frames.

“Where falls the shadow of Yggdrasil?” The heads and limbs of five men fleeing into the rain behind the fires were neatly lopped off.

“Where are the bright horizons at which the sky-seizing cities part clouds?”

This last question he screamed alone. The town was empty of the dregs of men. All were dead. The unnatural fires turned the town bright and hot, filling it with sudden color as the light revealed the red blood that swirled into black puddles on the soggy earth. The stench of burnt hair overwhelmed the smell of excrement. Rain sizzled where it fell on the blazing ruins.

Hexus trudged back to the crucifix and pulled the spikes that held the gorilla. The great beast fell to the Earth, the coagulated blood in her fur mixing into the mire. With his limited, dawning power, Hexus healed her flesh and his own as best he could.

He bent over the beast then and whispered, imploring, “Are all men so diminished? Are they all turned evil and worthless? Is there nothing that remains of the glories of the Penultimate Age?”

Hexus learned later that the gorilla could not fathom the meaning of these questions. She was young and had survived in the red lands of the Filthealm by scavenging with a group of other soulburdened beasts. For her, humans were terrifying and vicious but never glorious. She did not even believe the stories that humans had made the ancient places.

She lowered her head in a show of submission.

Hexus turned away. There remained perhaps one place where his questions could be answered. He must go to the Oracle.

He pushed on through the mud, heading west.

Hexus took a horse from another degenerate, bending space around the baffled man long enough to mount and ride his steed away. He rode for the sea.

The ape followed him. First on foot, limping slightly on its pained limbs. Then it stole a horse somehow, and rode just within sight of the god. This vigor astounded Hexus. How the gorilla found the reserves of strength after its ordeal he could not conceive. He had left it tortured, bled, exhausted. But somehow it followed.

The ape drew closer at night, seeking, he suspected, the security of being near his fire. It skimmed the edge of his firelight when he made a camp, a black and silver shape just within his view. He called to it then. He implored it to join him by the fire, calling out in Common, then in Lifweg, then the language of his guild. It never answered, but remained ever silent.

Few humans dwelled in this landscape. The crowded world that Hexus had known was gone. After his first days of travel, he stumbled on another village. Soulburdened coyotes were nailed to fence posts on the edge of town, the back feet of each hammered together under a single spike. They were dead, and crows had fed on their eyes, but the posts were gnawed near the heads of the animals,
revealing that they had been alive when they had been fixed there. He noticed then that each coyote had had its tongue cut out. He understood finally why the gorilla did not answer.

He stole food in that village, hardly palatable, and then passed on without allowing a single person to see him. He passed a village every day after that, for the next three weeks. Every human who saw him and saw the eye of the god fled in revulsion or threatened violence. He killed eight men and women in those weeks, in each case only after others had raised their hands in violence against him. These few remaining mortals, huddled together in odious ignorance, permitted nothing strange or mysterious.

He came finally to the sea. He skirted a small fishing village, with little weathered boats drawn up on the beach or floating in the shallows, their small tattered sails hanging limply on uneven masts. The gorilla was nowhere to be seen. He rode south on the beach, the horse’s hooves thudding gently on the sand. At night he drew fish from the ocean and cooked them, relying upon the Stalker’s knowledge of how to gut and roast the animals. During the day, he looked bitterly at the ruins that he passed and the straggling bands of humans that he had to repel.

After two weeks riding south, he came to the beginning of the great salt marshes. This at least was as he expected. He turned the horse away and continued on foot.

His arm began to burn with a searing pain. The Stalker’s mortal flesh rebelled against its burden. The god’s flesh was killing the Stalker, and Hexus could not heal the hurt. His power was too new, and he feared that it might even be something beyond the power of a numinous will to repair: this melding of the Aussersein, the otherworldly flesh of a god, and the mortal meat of a man. Sometimes the thoughts of the Stalker, weakly separate, raged at him. But nothing could be done. He did not yet see any way to save the Stalker, and his sympathy for this brute species of men waned. The Stalker was not near his conscience.

On the eighth morning of his walk, before him, on the horizon, rose a thin needle of a tower. He sat on the soft marshy ground and stared, overcome with relief that something remained.

The Temple of the First Oracle stood in the center of the bleak expanse of the great western salt marshes: a single spire rising up against an otherwise uninhabited horizon, with sea to the west, and tree-topped rolling hills to the east. Seagulls screeched at him as he toiled from one muddy mound to the next. Insects hovered over him, and flies gnawed at the rotting flesh of his right arm. Twice he stopped and killed all the biting bugs, exploding the space within the thousands that had gathered, so that they popped with a hissing sound like rain on hot stones. But he gave up even this and pushed ahead as well as he could.

The spire drew slowly but relentlessly closer.

By midday he came to the rocky island from which it rose. The Oracle stood on a circle of white stone. Hexus stumbled up onto the platform and hurried around to the front. The tall, narrow, seamless doors were closed. The inscription over the doors had worn away long before.

He had last been here as a boy—when had that been, he wondered? How many years? At that time, only the most powerful or worthy were allowed to question the Oracle. Scholars made pilgrimages from every school and city of Earth to stand before these doors and read the inscription above, waiting to be granted an audience within.

With his brother and sisters, the other Potentiates, he had pushed boldly in front of the pilgrims and walked inside. Shouting, laughing, they demanded wisdom of the Oracle. He had been then the proud culmination of the Penultimate Age of Homo Sapiens. The realization of the centuries of work and design by the Theogenics Guild and the Dark Engineers. He had been about to die and return to life a god. He had been about to redeem humankind by transcending it.

He called out now into the thin wind, shouting in the Stalker’s alien, unfamiliar voice. No answer came, and the doors did not move. He shoved against them. Still no answer, and still the metal did not yield. He raised his hand, and shattered the bonds of corrosion that cemented together the hidden hinges and seams, turning the rust to liquid. The long invisible seams split. Wind pushed the doors wide. He staggered into the warm dark, pressed the doors closed, and laid his pack against them.

Ancient lights in the walls of the hexagonal room reluctantly took on a dim glow. The ceiling towered above. The metal clang of the closing doors echoed up into the dark distance. The interior walls were cracked and richly textured sandstone, just as he had remembered. The room was otherwise empty but for, in one corner, a sculpture of a whip-thin human figure, not much taller than a child, portrayed with one foot forward in a deep stride. The arms and legs of the statue were as thin as his own wrists, the head as narrow and flat as a hand. It stood on an uneven, pocked plinth, and the feet seemed to struggle to pull away from this base.

That was something new, he thought, wondering what it meant. But before he could approach it, a brown stone obelisk, as tall and broad as a man, rose from the featureless floor in the center of the room: the Voice of the Oracle.

“I am Hexus!” he called in the language of the Theogenics Guild. “Answer me, Oracle.”

“I answer you, Hexus.” The Oracle’s voice, soft but clear, spoke back to him in his guild tongue.

“What is the year? The Metatheon Year?”

“Four thousand and sixty three.”

Hexus collapsed backwards onto the floor. His mouth fell open. He sat there, his legs askew, staring dumbly at nothing.

Four thousand years! He had not been mad to recollect vaguely an endless perdition of featureless dark, an emptiness that he had endured while he somehow saw nothing. It had been not just years,
not just centuries, but eons! And yet, only eons could explain the dolorous primitiveness he had witnessed, the complete disappearance of the triumphs of the Penultimate Age.